(Host) While Vermont summers are short, summer memories can last a long time. In our series “Summer Times”, VPR commentators reflect on the importance of the past and recall some unforgetable summer experiences. Here’s commentator Willem Lange, who remembers childhood summers as a mixed blessing. Going to camp produced intense homesickness, but also amazing spurts of new growth.
(Lange) Even after more than 50 years, it takes very little to bring it all back. A dish of tapioca pudding will do it. A puff of wind from a grove of white pines on a hot day. Rings of brown dirt around my ankles under my socks after walking a dusty trail. The reek of a wet towel thrown into a corner and swarming with earwigs.
If kids were allowed to make the decision, summer camps would be out of business in five years, because no kid would want to go for the first time. All kids know that everything about them – their spectacles, haircut, clothes, pink knees and skinny arms, even their names – look or sound stupid. But kids don’t get to make the decision, so there you are.
How could we have enjoyed it? Yet we did. After that first day when everything was new, the rituals carried us through. There were morning colors, breakfast, work stations, activity periods, lunch, afternoon nap, and mail call, with its treasures from home. And for each of us there were one or two staff members who could be trusted – who reached out to us through the confusion, and smiled, and tried to help. They taught us archery and riflery, swimming, orienteering, Morse Code.
The only knots I’d ever tied in my life before that were in my shoelaces and around bundles of newspapers. Outside the mess hall there was a knot board with pieces of rope hanging down, where our cabin counselor taught us a new knot each day. We learned them all – faithful square knot and despised granny, sheet bend, bowline, clove hitch – the whole board. I’ve never forgotten one of them. They’ve been companions of mine for over five decades.
The lake had the strongest attraction for me. Not swimming; boats and fishing. To qualify to take out rowboats, we had to pass a 100-yard swimming test.. If we wanted to take out a canoe, we had to swim a quarter-mile from the boathouse to Royal Island. I knew I’d made it when I saw the trees of the island towering above me. What I didn’t know was how many years, and how many thousands of miles, I would spend in canoes from that moment on.
One counselor started a sailing program. An old wooden catboat lay upside down in the woods. For two weeks, four hours a day, several of us scraped, sanded, caulked, and painted. Two days before the end of camp, we launched our resurrection and raised the sail. We made it fifty yards from the dock before a puff of wind caught us. With the counselor screaming, “Let go the rope! Let go the rope!” we slowly toppled over. The Director had been watching, and banned all further sailing that year. But what a glorious 50 yards!
This is Willem Lange up in Erna, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in Etna, New Hampshire. He spoke from our studio in Norwich.